K-Rail is ill-conceived, badly planned, very badly handled: Metroman

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Metroman E Sreedharan's opposition to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's dream K-Rail project continues unabated as he lashed out at it again on Thursday.

"In one sentence, I will say this K-Rail project is ill-conceived, badly planned and very badly handled," said Sreedharan to the media at his home town in Malappuram.

If completed it will set up a 529.45 km corridor connecting Thiruvananthapuram to Kasaragod and a train which will run this distance will complete its journey in around four hours and Pinarayi has already announced his intent that come what may, he will go ahead with it and the CPI-M and its leaders have all echoed the same. However, there has been very strong opposition from the Congress, BJP and at numerous places, people have also raised their anger.

Elaborating on this, Sreedharan said on Thursday that Kerala is passing through very difficult times financially.

"Loans are being taken to pay salaries and at the moment what I will say, wait for 3 to 4 years and then see it. The present planned K-Rail project is not at all good for the state as lot of land has to be acquired and more than 25,000 people have to be displaced. According to the plan any high speed rail on land is not advisable as it creates lot of issues," added Sreedharan.

Incidentally the time frame for completion of this project according to Pinarayi is five years and Sreedharan says when he came to know of this he wrote to the chief minister and said the costing is not right.

"They said the cost of the project is around Rs 64,000 crore. Generally, there are two types of cost, one is estimated cost and the other is completion cost. When I raised this issue, I got a reply stating that this is the completion cost. This means the estimate cost should be around Rs 35,000 crore. But then this is wrongly estimated and done just to get sanction," added Sreedharan.

"They say it will be completed in 5 years’ time and let me tell you, I am ready to cooperate in it, but not with this project as even if there are 10 Sreedharans it will take 10 years," said Sreedharan.

Incidentally this is the second time that Sreedharan has come out strongly against the project and on the first occasion, he termed it as an idiotic proposal.